Bhaktapur, November 22

The Ministry of Education is preparing to introduce letter grading system in School Leaving Certificate examinations from this year.

Curriculum Development Centre and Office of the Controller of the Examinations are doing homework to implement the letter grading system.

So far, OCE has been using numerical grading system, while there exists four categories — distinction, first division, second division and passed — to evaluate students’ performance. OCE had introduced the letter grading system for technical and vocation stream in the pilot phase last year. OCE had published the result of 3,256 students under the technical and vocational stream using the letter grading system last year.

Under the letter grading system last year, students scoring between 90 to 100 per cent were given ‘A+’, 80 to 89 per cent ‘A’, 60-79 per cent ‘B’, 40-59 per cent ‘C’, 25-39 per cent ‘D’ and those scoring below 24 percent marks were given ‘E’.

Of the students appearing in the examinations, 215 students got ‘A+’, 779 students got ‘A’, 2,131 students got ‘B’, 124 got ‘C’ and one student got ‘D’.

Diwakar Dhungel, executive director, CDC today said they have formed a nine-member committee under his coordination to prepare working procedure for implementation of the letter grading system.

“Letter grading system was introduced in the pilot phase last year under technical and vocation stream for students from 99 schools, which was largely successful. And as per the government’s plan, the system will be introduced in all other streams from this year.”

Stating that the main motto behind introducing letter grading system in SLC exams was to avoid use of words such as pass and fail. “Still there are some challenges in implementing the new system as people still do not have the knowledge of the new system.”

He further said that the committee is still holding discussions to finalise the working procedure. Some of the members of the committee are MoE Spokesperson Hari Lamsal, Examination Controller Bishnu Bahadur Dware, and educationists Dr Lekhnath Adhikari and Dr Ganesh Bahadur Singh, among others.

The working procedures will be finalised within few weeks, said Dware.He further said that the students in the exempted category will be granted marks and divisions as per the past provisions.